My New Indie Favs

I stumbled across a music downloading site called NoiseTrade (find it here).  It appears to be on the up and up.  Perhaps everyone else out there knows about this; I'm not often accused of being on the cutting edge of the internet (have you heard about this site where you can post pictures??).  There are lots of independent bands that give you a sample of their latest cd's.  And it is organized to let you discover new bands based on what else you like.  Here are four I've downloaded and been listening to this week:

Elenowen.  This is a husband and wife duo somewhat reminiscent of Over the Rhine (except they both sing).  Evidently they were on NBC's "The Voice".  They have a self-titled EP that is very nice.  "We were better off" could be the anthem of twenty-somethings these days who aren't quite sure if they want to grow up.  Find their official site here.

Ivan & Alyosha is another folksy band from Seattle--though The Cabin Sessions which I downloaded from NoiseTrade is listed as acoustic rock by my media player.  Evidently these guys have been featured by NPR--which is very cool to middle-aged academic types.  My favorite song of the four included is "Don't Wanna Die Anymore."  Their name must obviously come from The Brothers Karamazov, and if they're interested in expanding to a trio, I'd volunteer to be Dmitri.

Band #3 is La Resistance (website here), which I couldn't resist because their album is called Philosophy.  Listen to tracks #2 and #5 and you'll be hooked. Here's how they describe themselves on their website:

"La Resistance is the past and the future. The old and the new. The classic and the experimental. Their unique sound and perspective is hard to categorize, but their influences range from New Order, Radiohead, The Cure, and Echo and the Bunnymen, to Interpol and Arcade Fire. Without departing from the timeless foundation of catchy melodies and poetic, poignant lyrics, La Resistance has an eye for the future, pushing the words and music to a place that is altogether inspiring but never ostentatious."

And finally, a solo guy by the name of Heath McNease.  The album from NoiseTrade is The Weight of Glory: Songs Inspired by the Works of C.S. Lewis.  These are 11 songs, the titles of which are taken from the titles of Lewis's popular books (plus one called "Edmund" after the Narnia character).  It is mostly acoustic stuff with some interesting electronic beats and such.  Good stuff.

Courageous and the Atonement

I graded a stack of papers recently for my history of Christian thought class.  A couple of these were about the atonement, and both mentioned a scene from the movie Courageous.  I've not seen the movie, and don't really have much of a desire to.  I grew up in the 80s when Christian music was trying to come into its own.  I listened to a lot of it, mostly because my music choices were significantly restricted by my parents.  I don't really resent this, any more than I resent having grown up in the places I did.  It was who I was and I'm sure it has contributed to who I am now.  But a couple of weeks ago one of the kids pulled out an old cassette deck from a storage place and we played some of my old Christian rock tapes from the 80s.  There was certainly a lot of nostalgia, but they really weren't that good.  The music was uninteresting and the lyrics were cheesy and preachy.  That's a sweeping generalization for which exceptions could be found, but I'll stand by it on the whole.

The point of that long digression into some of the silliness of my youth is to say that it seems to me that the Christian movies of today (of the Kirk Cameron genre) are in the same developmental phase as Christian music was in the 80s: cheesy and preachy.  I think there is a legitimate place for preaching and cheese, but I'm not sure if it should qualify as good art.  So, I generally don't watch those movies.  (I'd be happy to be pointed to the exceptions in that regard if any of you have some.)

Anyway, evidently there is a scene in Courageous when one of the characters compares God to a judge and says something like, "If someone were murdered and the judge let the murderer off the hook and didn't punish that crime, would you think that was a good judge?  No.  Of course not.  So would God be good if he didn't punish sin?  No. Of course not."  This is supposed to be an argument on behalf of the penal substitution theory of the atonement, I guess.  But I'm not very persuaded by it.  In the analogy, the crime wasn't committed against the judge, and so the judge is supposed to be an impartial protector of the law.  Is that really what they think God is?  If a crime was committed against me, and the offender was apologetic and offered to pay reparations, would I be considered a bad person if I said, "No, that's OK.  I forgive you.  Don't worry about it."??  Isn't sin committed against God, and so couldn't God forgive people without being called a bad judge??  Is it really forgiveness if God demands payment??  That sounds more like God is being paid off.

Christians of our generation have been pretty overwhelmingly persuaded by the narrative of penal substitution.  It seems to me that we need to think more carefully about the implications of such a position.  There's a lot of ink being spilled on theories of the atonement now, and some people are pretty sure that adopting the right theory is a necessary component of being saved.  God help us.  God help us all to think hard and long about matters of truth, and to be generous enough to admit that we might be wrong.

Saturday Night Dead

Continuing in the curmudgeonly theme of last post's "what is our culture coming to!?", today I'll whine about what is supposedly the acme of entertainment on television: Saturday Night Live.  We're big Mumford and Sons fans in our house, so when we heard they'd be the musical guests on the show this week, we set our mental calendars for last night.

It was a fun but tiring weekend, which included a trip to Indianapolis to watch son #2 make his varsity debut on the high school soccer team.  Friday night's game was lightening-ed out, but there were two on Saturday during bright sunshine and sustained 35 mph winds.  Then it was a hurried trip home to get son #3 to the high school's band-palooza at which he was a volunteer.  That got me home just in time to see ND prevail for the fourth week in a row on the football field.  Everyone else in the house was too tired to stay awake past 9:45pm, so they set the dvr to watch Saturday Night Live via recording on Sunday afternoon.  In one of my poorer decisions of the week, I decided to stay up and watch.

Talk about a massive waste of resources and what can only be called the nadir of culture (did I mention this would be curmudgeonly?)!  Are the comedians of our culture really so uncreative that the only way they know to get a laugh anymore is by appealing to sex?  I felt like a dirty old man sitting on my couch by myself peering through this magic window on the wall at the celebrity host doing an opening song-and-dance number where he ejaculated all around the studio.  The next skits were similarly raunchy.  It's a good thing I'm not God, because I probably would have nudged a meteor in the direction of 30 Rockefeller Plaza and taught them a lesson.  I know that recorded history shows that sex has been a main staple of entertainment for as long as there have been comedy acts.  Can we improve as a species in that regard?  We've done away with slavery; we've hugely increased life expectancy.  Is it too much to think that we might elevate mainstream comedy at least a notch or too above Sodom and Gomorrah?

Yes, Mumford and Sons did play a couple of numbers from their new album.  But it was nothing you can't find on YouTube already.  IMHO we'd all be better off if SNL would die off quickly.

CrossFit for Runners

On Wednesday last week I decided to run the half-marathon in the Sunburst race this weekend in South Bend.  It's a fun race, with about 1500 runners starting at the College Football Hall of Fame downtown and finishing on the 50 yard line of the Notre Dame football field.  Originally I thought I was going to be out of town for son #2's soccer tournament in Indianapolis, but when the schedule came out, it turned out that we didn't need to leave our northern latitude until after noon.  So on Wednesday I went out to run 10 miles to see if I might be ready for a 13.1 mile race.  It felt OK, so I anted up the $65 fee, not really knowing how it would go.  As it turned out, I ran the fastest half-marathon of my life, finishing 12th out of 91 runners in my age group.

Now, this is interesting.  I'm not an elite athlete.  I ran cross country in high school and was nothing spectacular on mediocre teams.  I was an occasional runner for most of my adult years, but then about four or five years ago I started running more seriously as a way to fend off middle age.  I've finished two marathons (crashing pretty bad at the end of both), but I've started training for six of them.  In the other four, my body didn't hold up through the training.  Which brings me to my main topic for the day.  Last October I got injured two weeks before the marathon I had signed up for.  It was a calf injury that came on after a twenty miler, and I had to bail out of the marathon.  In the wake of that experience, I joined the group of guys at Bethel doing CrossFit.  Since then, I've been pretty faithful at doing CrossFit workouts (3 or 4 days per week) and not as faithful running (only 1 or 2 days per week).  I was curious to see how that would affect my running fitness.  Seems to have affected it pretty well.

Three years ago, I ran this same Sunburst half-marathon course in 1:43:03.  According to my running log (which I keep meticulously), in the six weeks leading up to that race, I had run 117 miles, including five runs of 8 miles or more (including two 10s and a 12).  This year I ran the course in 1:39:24, and in the six weeks leading up to it I ran only 71 miles, including only two above 8 miles.  But evidently the CrossFit workouts add something.  These are typically short (less than 15 minutes) workouts at a very high intensity.  There are lots of pushups, pullups, burpees (remember this post), box jumps, and medicine ball tosses (as well as a bunch of screwy things).  And we do Olympic lifts like dead lifts, clean and jerks, and snatches.  The overall philosophy is to emphasize core strength and overall body fitness.  We occasionally do some running as part of the workouts, but it is usually 400m intervals or less.  We did do a 5k a couple of weeks ago, which I gutted out in 21:30 on a fairly hilly course.

I think the core strength and overall fitness helped.  There is probably some benefit in these workouts similar to doing sprints, because we are always in anaerobic territory.  But I suspect that another big benefit has been the practice at pushing myself.  I am a solo runner, but CrossFit is done in community.  That encourages good-natured competition, and pride can often keep you going so that your comrades don't see you quit.  That sort of attitude helps develop the mental side of running.  In the race yesterday, I very consciously kept an easier pace at the beginning because I wanted to be able to push it at the end.  So my first few miles were at 7:50 pace.  But by midway I started pushing a bit more and just kept going.  Mile 13 was my fastest mile at 6:58.  Fun stuff.

There is one other possibility that could account for the good run: my music playlist.  My family thinks it is (more than) a little funny that I often listen to lectures while I run.  But for this one I decided to put together a custom playlist.  It worked pretty well.  I pulled some songs that had a running-themed message, and some worship songs, and some that were just audio assaults that made my legs keep moving.  Here's the list:

Awake my Soul - Mumford and Sons
Here is our King - David Crowder Band
Forget and not Slow Down - Relient K
Farther Along - Josh Garrels
Run for the Prize - Petra
Afterlife - Switchfoot
Carousel - Paper Route
Rawkfist - Thousand Foot Krutch
Alive - P.O.D.
Meant to Live - Switchfoot
Other Side of the World - KT Tunstall
Names that Fell - Zach Williams
Magnificent - U2
O Praise Him - David Crowder Band
Your Love is a Song - Switchfoot
The Cave - Mumford and Sons
Viva la Vida - Coldplay
Mysterious Ways - U2
Smack Down - Thousand Foot Krutch
Comatose - Skillet
Second Wind - Petra
Fire it Up - Thousand Foot Krutch
Rebirthing - Skillet
The Messenjah - P.O.D.
You are my Joy - David Crowder Band
American Dream - Switchfoot

It played out pretty well.  I finished during the second to last song.

I'm already registered for a marathon in October because I was able to defer my entry from last year.  We'll see if this CrossFit and music combination can carry me twice the distance.

Listening to Leonard Cohen

To the chagrin of my family, I've really been enjoying Leonard Cohen's new album.  He's the guy most famous for the "Hallelujah" song, which was a hit about thirty years ago, and he wasn't exactly young then.  He must be about 90 years old by now... OK, I just looked it up on Wikipedia: evidently he's only 78 (and I also see there that Lou Reed reckons Cohen among the highest and most influential echelon of songwriters).  But he sounds like he's 90.  And that is the source of the chagrin.  On this new album, I'm not sure that what he's doing should be called singing.  It is perhaps better described as the vocal equivalent of shuffling one's feet.  But it fits marvelously with the focus of the songs.  It sure feels like a swan song. And I'd like to think that I'm too young to be thinking about the end of life.  But I guess in the same way that King Lear is my favorite of Shakespeare's tragedies, the songs that probe into our mortality are the ones that ring true with me.  My favorite on the album is "Come Healing" (find it here).  Here's a snippet:

O gather up the brokenness
Bring it to me know
The fragrance of those promises
You never dared to vow 

The splinters that you carried
The cross you left behind
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind 

Let the heavens hear it
The penitential hymn
Come healing of the spirit
Come healing of the limb 

Behold the gates of mercy
In arbitrary space
And none of deserving
The cruelty or the grace 

O solitude of longing
Where love has been confined
Come healing of the body
Come healing of the mind 

O see the darkness yielding
That tore the light apart
Come healing of the reason
Come healing of the heart

That's good, powerful stuff.

Nashville

Thinking about my trip tomorrow brought this song to mind from one of my favorite duos (I hope that doesn't make you think less of me).   Find it here.

This song is not one of their best, and I hope it's not prophetic about my experience in Nashville.

Here are a couple of my favorites by them:  Secure Yourself to Heaven

and Galileo.

My first introduction to the Indigo Girls came my junior year in college when the guy in the room next to me (Glen Leinbach) played them for me.

My wife and I got to see them live at the Morris Civic several years back, but Emily had lost her voice that night so it wasn't quite full experience.

I'll talk to you all next week.

Not Quitting my Day Job. . . Yet

Tonight could signal the beginning of a new career for me.  I'll be appearing as the bass guitar player in a band called "All Aboard" in my fine institution's annual Battle of the Bands.  A couple of my freshman students from last semester put this band together and thought it might somehow distinguish them from their competitors if they enlisted the rusty talents of a bald, middle-aged philosophy professor on an instrument that mostly hides in the shadows and can't screw things up too badly.  Of course I enthusiastically agreed and have found this gig to be wildly enjoyable.  The other four members of All Aboard are much better musicians than I am, and in my completely biased opinion we sound pretty good.  We're playing a cover of the Newsboys cover of Daniel Bashta's "Like a Lion (God's not Dead)" and then an original song by our lead guitarist/vocalist, CJ Hock.  Evidently the voting is some combination of the opinions of a couple of judges plus the vote-by-text totals of the audience.  So if you're in the area and the thought of seeing a middle-aged guy in skinny jeans doesn't completely repulse you, stop by the main auditorium tonight.  (bonus points for successfully identifying the guy in the photo, who IMHO is the finest bass guitar player on the planet today. . . though I could only find this picture of him rocking the double bass).

Symphony

So the reincarnation of my blog seems to be a lot more just newsy stuff about the family than it is deep reflections on life. And by the comments and readership stats, it appears that the blogging public preferred the old format...

Nevertheless, I'm going keep the new way going for at least another entry. Our middle son, Trevor, plays on a xylophone team at his fifth grade. The coach for the team is the principal tympanist for the South Bend Symphony. Last weekend the team got to play at a fancy reception and then in the lobby prior to the symphony.

Also notable is the fact that the symphony performance was the special 75 year Gala celebration for the SBSO. And for the occasion, they brought symphonic superstar, Hillary Hahn to town. Here is a picture of her with Bethel math professor Rob Myers (and his wife Michelle)--no slouch himself at the violin.

Good times had by all.

Is it live?

Last night I dropped my son off at the Skillet concert in Elkhart where he was meeting his cousin. I brought my computer along and went somewhere for a couple of hours to kill the time. After the battery ran out, I drove back to the venue, thinking that it may about be over. When I pulled up in front of the auditorium, there were about 100 kids outside milling around and smoking. I sat there for a bit watching, and came to the realization that there were two opening acts (1000 foot crutch and someone else), and that it was probably in between acts at the moment. I also noticed that these people were going in and out without showing tickets or otherwise being regulated. So, I wondered if it was like a baseball game where after the sixth inning you can come and go as you please.

So I wandered in with the smokers and got to see the show. I'd seen Skillet a couple of times at Cornerstone and even have them listed in my favorite music section of Facebook. It's good hard rock with some pretty cool string sections. Lots of strobe lights and lasers and smoke in concert. Very loud. Not the most profound of lyrics (e.g., "you're better than drugs"), but still enjoyable.

The music is pretty heavily produced, though, so when you're watching it live, you're never really sure how much is just coming from the apple computer that is sitting on top of the keyboards. They had a violinist with them, but pretty obviously he couldn't have been make all that sound. And the bass player is also the lead singer, and about half the time he's romping around not even pretending to play (but the music doesn't seem to suffer). Nobody seems to care, though, because it sounds so professional.

I suppose that lack of caring is what has allowed video churches to thrive. It doesn't matter that the speaker isn't really there; we can watch it on the screen and get a more professional version than we would if we had to have a speaker that came out of the actual body of believers we're in the same room with. There's one local church who seems to be contemplating doing the entire service through video (not just the speaker, as many places do). I wonder, "Why not just have it piped to my TV and I can stay in bed?" It's not like we fellowship with the people around us while we're watching the "show" anyway (aside from the obligatory, "Turn to the people around you and tell them you're glad they're here" which takes place after the first music set).

I wonder where it is headed...